by John Lutz
“No’m,” he said, each time she asked, but she continued to strike with the belt, skillfully turning it at the end of some of the strokes so the edge of the leather cut flesh.
“I’ll give you blood!” she said. “The Lord saith to give them that sins plenty of blood. I’ll beat an’ beat till you’re washed in the blood of the lamb, and you’ll be pure!”
When she was exhausted, she dropped the belt and staggered out of the bedroom, leaving behind Marty’s lasting memory of his mother, a hunched, glum figure seen from the back, topped with a tangled mass of hair, trudging away from him.
Carl brought in the bottle of bourbon he’d been sipping from and used some of the liquor for antiseptic, which he applied with what was left of the T-shirt Alma had ripped off Marty.
“Woman’s got her scripture kinda misspoken,” Carl said, dabbing with the saturated cloth as Marty gritted his teeth in pain.
“All in all,” Marty said, “I like your religion better.”
“Our religion,” his father said, making sure there was plenty of alcohol on the welts he was treating. “Gonna kill us both, what she’s gonna do. I think she’s puttin’ roach poison in my whiskey. It don’t taste right. Hasn’t for a while. An’ it appears there’s some poison missin’ from the bottle out in the barn.”
“No call for roach poison in the winter,” Marty said.
His father nodded. “An’ my gut most times feels like it’s on fire.”
Marty said nothing, trying not to whine as the alcohol contacted the welts.
“Woman’s crazy,” Carl muttered as he applied aid. “Somethin’s gotta be done, is what. Somethin’s gotta be done.”
Marty knew there was no need to answer. It wasn’t the first time for this. It was something he’d gotten used to, as much as you could say anyone ever got used to serious whalings with a belt. Marty could absorb pain without complaint, when he knew he must. And he knew this was one of those times, and that it would happen again.
This was family ritual.
44
New York, the present
Quinn and Zoe had just left D’Zello’s Ristorante and were walking slowly along Broadway in the heat. He hadn’t tried to talk to her at lunch about what was bothering him. If it led to an argument, he didn’t want it to be where everyone could hear them.
They were moving faster than the traffic, which was backed up because one lane was closed for construction. Wooden sawhorses and yellow caution tape were everywhere, but it was impossible to tell what exactly was being done. Whatever it was involved a lot of digging, though no one could be seen at present doing work of any sort. Now and then a frustrated driver would lean hard on his horn. A siren yowled deafeningly and quickly faded, as if an emergency vehicle was going like hell a block over. Quinn knew it was probably bogged down in traffic and the driver was venting his frustration.
“Is there something you’d like to tell me?” he asked, as he strolled beside Zoe toward where his car was parked illegally with an NYPD placard on the lowered sun visor. A warm breeze kicked up, and he could feel the grit of construction dust on his teeth.
“About lunch?” she asked.
“You’re the psychoanalyst,” he said. “You think that’s what I’m asking about?” Immediately he regretted the tone of his own voice; it was almost as if he were interrogating a suspect.
But damn it, she asked for it.
Or had she? Maybe he’d misinterpreted her words and facial expression.
After four more, slightly slower steps, she said, “What are you asking?”
“When we were together this morning and I joked about how I tended to get a phone call about a murder after we’ve had sex, the look on your face suggested something had crossed your mind.”
“I’m that transparent?”
He smiled. “ ’Fraid so.”
They walked silently for a while. A hybrid bus accelerated away from a stop in the street alongside them, leaving a strong scent of environmentally proper exhaust. A new smell for the olfactory stew of New York.
“I hesitated mentioning what I thought,” Zoe said, “because it’s probably meaningless, and if I told you about it there might be unnecessary trouble.”
“Should you be the judge of that?”
“Maybe. There’s also a professional obligation.”
They were at the parked Lincoln. Quinn slowed and stood beside the car. Sunlight glinted off its roof and obscured his vision so he had to move in order to see Zoe clearly. “This is about one of your patients,” he said.
“No, nothing like that.”
He rested a hand very gently on her back, spanning her shoulder blades beneath the thin material of her blouse with his long fingers. The slight contact made her heart thump, and not only from aroused sexual memory. There was something about Quinn that made people want to give up their secrets. She thought he would have made a damned good psychoanalyst. Better yet, a priest.
In a way, that’s what he is.
“Zoe?” he said, as if reminding her that he was there, waiting for her explanation.
The words seemed to flow from her of their own accord. “When you mentioned the coincidence of learning about two of the murders when we were together, each time after we had sex, it made me think of someone.”
“Someone you suspect?” He really didn’t see how that was possible.
“Someone I…used to be involved with.”
Ah…! He didn’t like where this might be going. “The way you’re involved with me?”
“Not exactly. Not in any way. You and Alfred aren’t at all alike.”
Alfred? “But you were lovers?”
“Yes. For a brief while. It ended over a year ago.”
“Who-”
“I ended it. Alfred…our sex was becoming more and more violent.”
“He hurt you?”
“Sometimes. When he was in sexual thrall. Or when he became angry with me.”
She seemed to be recalling the affair with the objectivity of her profession. She might have been talking about two other people, and to someone she barely knew. “Angry about what?” he asked.
“Anything and everything. Alfred had-probably still has-anger issues. Sometimes they find an outlet when they’re sexually engaged. He’s sadistic and admits it. He was looking for something in me I wasn’t prepared to give him.”
“How badly did he hurt you?”
“It was nothing serious. Minor bruises. Whip marks.”
“ Whip marks? Jesus, Zoe!”
“You’ve been a cop a long time, Quinn. You know the spectrum of human sexual activity, especially in this city. Alfred tried to persuade me to engage in things that left me cold, sometimes things that repulsed me. I hope I don’t need to go into detail. In fact, I won’t go into detail.”
Quinn sensed her getting mad at him. So Zoe had her own anger issues. Well, maybe she had good reason.
“I’m not pressing you for any information you don’t want to give. And I can see why, when the subject of women being murdered and defiled came up, you’d naturally think of…does he have a name beyond Alfred?”
“Beeker. Dr. Alfred Beeker. He’s a psychoanalyst.”
“Like you?”
“Not exactly. He’s a cognitive analyst.”
“And you are…?”
“What you might call a creative Jungian.”
Quinn thought he’d better take a different tack. “If Beeker’s a psychologist, can’t he figure out he needs help himself?”
“He’s a psychiatrist, actually, who practices psychotherapy and augments it with drugs, and apparently he doesn’t think he needs help. There are plenty of people out there playing the same games he plays, so he’s not at a loss for partners.”
“It can be a dangerous game.”
“That’s part of the allure. Listen, Quinn, Alfred moves in a world he considers normal. And for the people in it, maybe it is normal. No laws are being broken, and everything is consensual. But what it c
ame down to was I wasn’t part of that world and didn’t want to be, and he couldn’t accept that.”
“I more or less agree with you about consensual adults, but what you described between the two of you didn’t sound consensual.”
She smiled in that gradual, quiet way that devastated him. “The problem was that sometimes pretending to be forced was part of the game. It got so Alfred couldn’t see the difference. As far as he was concerned, the game was always on.”
“And for him it wasn’t a game,” Quinn said.
“For me it wasn’t always a game.” She moved away from Quinn and leaned with her buttocks against the car’s sun-warmed fender, crossing her arms. “He didn’t like it that I left him.”
“You afraid of him?”
“Not anymore. I haven’t even seen him in months. Maybe he doesn’t think of me at all.”
“That’d be a tough job for any man. What you were thinking this morning, Zoe?…Was it that he might know about you and me, might resent it, and it could somehow be tied in with the Slicer murders?”
Again Quinn surprised her with his nose for the truth, as if he were some sort of psychic bloodhound. He would get there sooner or later on his own, so she might as well tell him.
“He…” She tightened her grip on her elbows and swallowed. “He sometimes insisted on role playing, doing a scene where he raped me at knifepoint. He even wore a mask and pretended he’d just come in through my bedroom window. He took photographs with a digital camera. He told me he’d posted some on the Internet, though nothing too suggestive. But I was always afraid he’d…taken some I wasn’t aware of.”
“Hell, Zoe…”
“Back in college people said psych majors went into it because of their own crazy hang-ups. Maybe they were right.”
Quinn shrugged. “I’ve heard the same thing about my profession. Maybe they were right, too.”
“I know I was an idiot, but I went along with it. A few times, it went too far. He cut me.”
“ Cut you?”
“Not badly, and he always said it was an accident. But I associate dead women and knives with Alfred Beeker.”
“I can see why. I’m going to talk to him, Zoe.”
“That’s what I was afraid of.”
“I won’t do anything drastic. But it wouldn’t be a bad idea to feel Beeker out and see if he’s still into those kinds of games, and if they’ve become even more violent.”
“Quinn, I don’t want you playing the protector-avenger role.”
“I’m a cop, Zoe. Women are being murdered and butchered with a knife, and I’ve just learned about a sadist who likes to cut women. I need to look into him. I think you knew that, or you wouldn’t have told me about him. Am I right?”
“I don’t even know.”
Quinn thought he knew. The city harbored more than a few sadists who liked to cut women, and he doubted that Beeker was the Slicer. Still, it wouldn’t hurt to warn Beeker, to make sure the nutcase doctor knew there’d be consequences if he bothered Zoe again. Later, if necessary, would come the avenger part of Quinn’s role.
He moved closer to her, leaned down, and kissed her cheek. She was wet with perspiration.
“Let’s get in the car and get the air conditioner going,” he said. “I’ll drive you home.”
“To my office,” she said. “I’ve got a two o’clock appointment.”
“With a psychotic killer?”
“With a man who’s terrified of turning corners when he’s walking alone.”
“Oh,” Quinn said, “that’s all of us.”
He opened the car door for her and watched her get in, thinking again how gracefully she moved and how beautiful she was. How much he already cared about her. She was becoming an addiction, his own illness and fixation.
So this is what it’s like dating a psychoanalyst.
“What are you thinking?” she asked, as they pulled away from the curb.
“How glad I am I didn’t bring up this subject in the restaurant,” he said.
Later that same afternoon, Quinn found Dr. Alfred Beeker in the Manhattan phone directory. His office was on Park Avenue, about three blocks away from Zoe’s.
Quinn thought he should see the doctor as soon as possible, with or without an appointment.
45
“So the doctor says, ‘Not only have I never seen anyone get pregnant that way, I don’t understand how it could happen.’”
Jackie Jameson’s delivery was spot on the beat, and the punch line drew a good laugh from the Say What? audience. But Jameson’s mind wasn’t completely on his work. It used to be that New York comedy clubs were hazy with tobacco smoke, but not anymore, so from where Jackie stood onstage it was easy to read the expression on the face of the man trying to bore holes in Mitzi Lewis with his eyes.
Mitzi was a looker who attracted lots of the wrong kind of attention, with her spiky white blond hair, childlike features, and compact, curvaceous body. She was used to the attention, and her fellow comic Jackie was used to seeing it, but this guy seemed different. Much more intense. Like he wanted to have her right now with his Coke and fries.
Mitzi was scheduled to do the set after Jackie, so she was standing just offstage waiting to be introduced, visible only to a small part of the audience seated off to the side. The guy with the laser eyes and his tongue hanging out was alone at his table and had a perfect view.
Jackie took him in again with a sidelong glance while laying the groundwork for his final joke, the one about the man who thought he was a violin. The man at the table was handsome in a dark, predatory way, about average height and build, but there was something about him that suggested great physical strength. Though he wasn’t the only guy in the club wearing a dark blue suit and white shirt with a tie, he was the only one who looked like he’d just stepped off the cover of GQ. And the only one who for some reason looked flat-ass rich. He had the high cheekbones, well-defined features, and thick black hair of a male model.
If I looked like that, Jackie thought, I wouldn’t be funny.
But Jackie was funny, and headed for his own Comedy Channel special.
He continued his routine onstage without seeming to pay any attention to the man staring at Mitzi. But Jackie was still watching the guy. He was seated at one of the tiny tables that had been jammed in at the edges to accommodate maximum audiences. There was barely room on the thing for his elbows. The glass before him was empty. When a waiter approached and tried to push another drink on him, he made a flicking motion with his hand that somehow was a threat. The waiter retreated.
The longer Jackie watched the guy, the more he figured the handsome gawker was trouble and might want to do more than just look at Mitzi. Considering what was happening around town, with those women getting their throats sliced and their guts cut out, Jackie thought it might be wise to warn Mitzi about the guy.
Not that Jackie, who had his own plans for Mitzi, was the jealous type, but he did know that next to the dude in the blue business suit he looked like a troll. And a dumb one at that. Something else about the guy was that he looked intelligent even when sex starved which was when Jackie looked his dumbest.
“I thought you meant sex and violins!” Jackie heard himself say.
He got his expected big laugh, told the audience they’d been great and that he loved them, and then strode off stage. Ted Tack, who owned and managed Say What? passed him going the other way and gave him a big grin and a mock salute. The mood was on.
“Don’t be obvious about it,” Jackie said to Mitzi, “but check out the guy in the blue suit, sitting alone right of stage and eating you up with his eyes.”
Mitzi leaned forward to peek as she was being introduced. “Yummy.”
“If you like raw sewage.”
“That’s harsh,” Mitizi said. “When I go on I’m gonna blow him a kiss.”
“Don’t be craz-”
But her intro was finished and she was gone, prancing toward the microphone and waving her arms.
Jackie wasn’t surprised when she didn’t blow the creep a kiss. She was too much of a pro for that, already into the moment, where the laughs were to be found.
“You guys are great! Anybody out there got a crazy uncle?”
Mitzi avoided looking at the man as she worked her way through her set. The folks out there grinning at her, already softened up by alcohol and Jackie Jameson, soon warmed to her. Then they were with her; then she was with them. Then she had them. God, what a great feeling! She deliberately avoided looking at Mr. Handsome in the blue suit, not letting anything get in the way of her timing and delivery.
But a part of her mind did wonder what Jackie was all worked up about. She didn’t see anything wrong with the guy, and he sure wasn’t the first to look at her with a hungry expression. She could recall catching Jackie himself staring at her in that cat-and-canary way, so what was the big deal?
She was halfway through her Seinfeld imitation, enjoying a big laugh, when she looked directly at Mr. Handsome.
Mistake.
Their eyes met, and she felt as if she’d been Tasered. Whoa! His hooded dark gaze took her breath away and made her legs rubbery. When she inhaled, her hot breath seemed to go straight to her stomach, making her weak.
Definitely something there.
She understood now what Jackie meant. There wasn’t the slightest doubt in her mind what this man was thinking, what he was doing with her in his mind. And they both knew she was a willing participant.
Best of all, everything about him suggested he was thinking exclusively of her. Intensely.
Mitizi liked intensity. There was too little of it around these days.
Jackie was right: this man held a power over her that she could no more deny than understand. What passed between them was a dark promise of unexplored pains and pleasures. Creepy? Sure. Mitzi could see how Jackie would read it that way. And maybe he was right. Most definitely he was right. Here was the danger of deep water.
What Jackie didn’t know-and what Mitzi was now discovering-was that she liked it.
God help me. I like it!
